IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.
>IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search
It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing.
Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0]
Friend, back in the day many email and IRC rooms were archived. I wave my hat to a thing called MARC. One used to use Google (pre-stackoverflow) and see threads from the OGs. And one could find the core-expert lurking. Sometimes you could make a personal connection.
The ephemeral is indeed a bug. Anything important should be saved somewhere else (notes, decisions, docs, wiki,..) IRC is the same as watercooler or quick group meeting, no one brings a recorder to have everything on file.
You can just run bots. We had one who was responsible for archiving everything so it was searchable, and would allow you to search, another which would allow you to do deployments, and another which complained about severe errors in the critical environments.
I still don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.
>I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.
For many businesses, this is a feature, not a bug.
Internal communications are discoverable in litigation. If you have records, you can be compelled to turn them over.
I used to work in healthcare. Internal messages had a maximum retention of 30 days. That wasn't driven by IT or the users. That was a decision made by legal. In that space, you are always being sued by somebody. The lawyers want to minimize exposure and that's a fight they're basically always going to win.
To be clear: it's better if that's a decision made by the business. But it's also one of those cases where what the decision makers care about isn't necessarily aligned with what the users care about, so there's ultimately not a lot of incentive for Slack to care.
